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| News: 3 million PS3s sold in the UK Created: 24-01-2010 16:48 |
3 Million PS3s Sold in the UKA milestone has just been reached in the number of Playstation 3 consoles sold in the UK. 3,000,000 are now in UK homes since its release on 23rd March 2007.
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| View: Christmas number one Created: 20-12-2009 19:58 |
Christmas Number OneFor those not in the UK or living under a rock, there has been a bit of a battle this year here for the Christmas number 1 in the music charts. For the last 4 years every number 1 at Christmas has been an X Factor winner created by the Simon Cowell money making machine, but finally 'the people' have put a stop to it.A campaign through Facebook was started and aimed at everyone sick and tired of Cowell manufacturing Xmas records, and it gained an enormous following. The Facebook group wanted "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine to be purchased by as many people as possible to keep the X Factors latest drivel from the top spot. It worked, which is an incredible feat considering it wasn't sold in any shops - it is purely available as a downloadable purchase. As a businessman, my hat goes off to Simon Cowell as he has been incredibly successful. The vaults full of money he has made show that. The problem is that people are now fed up of his factory churning out mindless garbage - either cover versions of other peoples songs or tracks which could be used as the definition of plagiarism. The making of music should be a creative process like any other art form, and invoke feelings in the listener or show what the author/performer was feeling. It has never been like this for Cowell, it's just a money making machine where 'artists' can be exploited for the maximum amount of publicity and profit. The public has spoken out about this in a language which the industry understands - with their wallets. What has this got to do with the PS3? Well, nothing really apart from the fact that both Simon Cowell's record label and Rage Against the Machine's are both owned by Sony. No matter which one won the top spot this Christmas, Sony was always going to be the winner! This could also be seen as a warning message for any company who try to mass produce an art form purely for profit. Take note computer games publishers. Rant over. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. |
| View: God of War 3 demo pics Created: 05-11-2009 17:54 Edited: 05-11-2009 17:56 |
God of War 3 Demo PicsI received my code to download the God of War III demo a few days ago but didn't get a chance to share my experience until now. It is nothing short of amazing! Everything from the high poly models, the textures, the atmosphere, the enormous scale of the levels and demons... to the smooth transitions from intros to gameplay and from one section to the next just works brilliantly.  Its not often you can call something both beautiful and horrible. By 'horrible' I mean in a stomach churning, jaw dropping, blood spurting, gory sort of way. Violence so well animated it almost turns it into an art form. Before you are tempted to jump on the 'video games promote violence' bandwagon you should know that your vicious actions are against evil demons and monsters (mostly).     The super high quality model of Kratos (your character) in the first picture above moves seamlessly from the title screen right into the in-game action. The rock titan which appears in the demo (third picture above) is HUGE. It makes you feel tiny, even after slicing your way through an army of enemies like butter.   Hacking and slashing your way through minions, a centaur, a minotaur type monster and literally ripping apart winged creatures which carry you across gaps in the demo feels worryingly good. The action is constant, fluid and brutal. If this really is the final installment in the God of War series then it is a real shame. The game isn't even out yet and I want more! ;-) |
| View: BBC Watchdog shambles over PS3 failure rate Created: 20-09-2009 20:10 Edited: 20-09-2009 20:15 |
BBC Watchdog Shambles Over PS3 Failure RateI watched the new format Watchdog last Thursday with particular interest because of the mention of the PS3 and what they described as Sony's refusal to fix a common 'Yellow Light of Death' (YLoD) problem. Surprise, surprise it turns out they didn't actually know anything about the subject matter but they did hire someone who gets paid by Microsoft to help out!
I have always quite enjoyed the Watchdog program and they have helped a lot of people in the past by exposing companies who rip off innocent members of the public. But their comments about the PS3 were so far off the mark they seriously need to sack their researchers or so called 'experts'. Lets go through some of the points they raised. They kept saying there have been thousands of reports of peoples PS3s dying with a yellow light displayed. The official figures show that only 0.5 percent of UK PS3s have been reported to have failed with a yellow light. This is out of 2.5 million sold here in the UK. Also, if the problem was so widespread, how come they could only find 3 people with faulty PS3s to bring to the studio? One of those had been tampered with by the owner on his own admission. They said that the PS3 cost £400. Obviously nobody keeps up with prices at the BBC as they don't seem to have noticed the huge publicity over the price drop to £250 recently. They make out the yellow light of death can easily be fixed by this special team they have discovered. The yellow light is a generic fault light simply reporting a non-specific error has occurred. A single fix cannot possibly repair all PS3s which show the yellow light. At the end of the program they admit that many of the repairs the team had done for them had actually failed again shortly afterwards but it was brushed over very quickly. Also, the 'easy' repair involved stripping the PS3 down to the circuit board, putting it into a special oven which heats the solder and seals dry joints on the components. Not so easy really, is it?! They made out that Sony won't repair this 'manufacturing fault' when it occurs. If the PS3 develops a fault in the first 12 months then Sony do repair or supply a replacement free of charge. If they fall outside of the 1 year warranty then they will still repair/replace them but charge a fee. This seems standard practice with electronic equipment these days. There is no evidence at all that there is a 'manufacturing fault' and the soldering voids (tiny gaps in the solder visible only under x-ray) mentioned by Watchdog fall well within IPC standards. Third party repair companies like the 'special team' Watchdog had found charge about £104 for a repair (plus courier fees) compared to Sony's £128 repair/replacement fee (inclusive of courier fees). Sony make no money from this (in fact they make a loss to keep customers happy). I know who I would trust more with my PS3 and its well worth the extra small amount. They use a guest presenter Iain Lee to report their discovery. I like Iain Lee and think he is a very funny guy. He was great on "The 11 O'clock Show" and "RI:SE" but he is employed by Microsoft. He has fronted corporate events by Microsoft and writes for their MSN gaming column. Impartial? I don't think so. The whole segment would be a joke if it didn't seem to be aimed at damaging PS3 sales or its reputation of reliability. My only thought was that they want Sony to offer a three year warranty like you get with an XBox360. They seem to have missed the point that MS had to offer a three year warranty due to a massive manufacturing fault on their part which led to a huge failure rate beyond any other console in history. I am not the only person who felt the show was biased and untruthful - in fact Sony have sent the BBC a six page letter explaining their factual errors, inaccuracies and exaggerations. |
| News: MET Office super computer has PS3 processors Created: 30-08-2009 13:12 Edited: 30-08-2009 13:13 |
MET Office Super Computer Has PS3 ProcessorsThe MET Office purchased a new P-Series IBM super computer in May last year which is 30 times faster than their old one. It cost £33 million, and it uses the Cell Broadband Engine processors - the same as the PS3! Of course they have added 13TB of memory and an array of hard disks totalling 550TB in storage space.The down side is that it requires a lot of power to keep this running 24 hours a day - 1.2 Megawatts in fact. It also won't be fully ready until 2011 but will reach 1 Petaflop, or 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second which makes it the second most powerful computer in the country. The current most power computer in the world is also from IBM and called the Roadrunner. It has reached almost 1.5 Petaflops but should be capable of of 1.7 Petaflops. This one cost $133 million (£81.8 million). It is a hybrid computer using 6,480 1.8GHz AMD Opteron dual-core processors and 12,960 3.2GHz PowerXCell processors. Each PowerXCell has a single PPE (Power Processor Element used for general purpose stuff) and 8 SPE's (Synergistic Processor Elements used for floating point operations). This may sound familiar as the PS3 uses a very similar Cell processor also running at 3.2GHz with 8 SPE's but one is disabled at manufacture time.  The new PS3 Slim (to be officially released in 2 days on 1st September 2009) apparently has a new version of the Cell processor inside which is produced using a 45nm process rather than the 65nm process used in the original PS3s. This has led to it using 40% less power and taking up 34% less space. It is also cheaper to produce hence the price drop. Yay! |
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